“Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They’re wrong,” proclaimed an NBC headline this past December. Citing “new FBI data,” the outlet was essentially telling Americans that they shouldn’t believe their lyin’ eyes. But, it turns out, it’s the data themselves that may be deceptive.
This is the conclusion of the Coalition for Law Order & Safety, an independent group of law enforcement officials and analysts. In their April 2024 report, “Assessing America’s Crime Crisis: Trends, Causes, and Consequences,” they identify “four potential causes for the increase in crime in most major cities across the U.S.: de-policing, de-carceration, de-prosecution and politicization of the criminal justice system,” related Fox News Monday.
Even insofar as crime may in certain respects be down from 2020 levels, say the analysts, this is deceptive because that year saw a historic spike in criminality. Yet, can we really know if crime has dropped at all given the data’s unreliability? As Fox explains:
Through aggregated data sets directly from more than 70 of the nation’s largest police departments and victim surveys, researchers claim violent crime has been “substantially elevated in major cities” compared to pre-2020 levels. The group’s research also showed that due to significant under-reporting of certain crimes, the FBI’s official data doesn’t completely capture the full snapshot of crime in the U.S.
“There’s a series of caveats attached to the FBI data that the FBI doesn’t make as clear as they should,” Sean Kennedy, one of the lead researchers, told Fox News Digital in an interview.
Kennedy said that, particularly in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd riots, several police departments redefined the classifications for certain violent crimes and transitioned away from a decades-old recording system.
“If you classify something as an aggravated assault, it’s a violent crime or a felony, but if you classify it as a simple assault, it’s then a misdemeanor and a non-violent crime,” Kennedy said. “That is a world of difference when it comes to how the media is going to portray whether or not your department is fighting violent crime.”
However, the police are not the only ones appearing to under-report. Businesses and individuals who are victims of violent crimes have also shown a pattern of reluctance when it comes to calling the police. The Loss Prevention Research Council’s survey of retailers sheds light on the reasons behind the lack of reporting. The study shows that typically, business owners tend to harbor the belief that police will not respond promptly or investigate crimes, and prosecutors will not pursue charges against the perpetrators.
I can vouch for this personally. I lived in the Bronx till age 28, and off the top of my head can think of three somewhat valuable items that were stolen from my family but which we never reported to police. We knew it would be futile.
Logic dictates, too, that this phenomenon will worsen as people’s sense of futility increases. And the latter is precisely what happens as a result of de-policing, de-carceration, de-prosecution, and politicization of the criminal justice system. “The cops won’t do anything,” is the thinking. “So why bother?”
Then there are those numerous caveats Kennedy mentioned. For example, while 89 percent of municipal police departments submitted crime reports to the FBI in 2019 (participation is voluntary), this figure had dropped to 63 percent by 2021. And strikingly, three high-crime cities — Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City — submitted no crime data at all to the FBI in 2023, Fox relates.
Moreover, New Orleans’ police department just revealed that they’d underreported sex crime data they’d provided to the FBI in 2021 and ’22, Fox further informs.
This deceptive crime picture surely has multiple causes, including high-crime, left-wing jurisdictions’ desire to make themselves look better and good old-fashioned incompetence. Yet it reflects a wider problem, as commentator Olivia Murray mentions. “There are fake stats everywhere,” she writes — “climate metrics, economy numbers, inflation rates, employment/unemployment… and what else?”
Here’s one: Some people called Barack Obama the “deporter in chief,” referring to his administration’s supposedly high “deportation numbers.” Largely unknown, however, is that this was deceptive: Obama’s people had, for the first time, included people intercepted at the border and turned away in the “deported” category.
Then, of course, there were the highly inflated Covid death numbers.
But speaking of reclassification, Murray mentions another deceptive crime-data phenomenon: “booking non-whites as ‘white.’” She then provides a couple of innumerable such examples:
Of course, many people are wise to the con. As X user Mike Leigh Torres wrote under the second tweet, “Bad latinos are by definition white. All sanctuary cities use this categorization.”
Unbeknownst to most, the reality is that law enforcement agencies generally place Hispanic criminals in the “white” category. This is, in at least part, because “Hispanic” is an ethnic classification, not a racial one; technically, most Hispanics are Caucasian.
This nonetheless deceives people because, first, the average American associates “white” with “Anglo whites” (heck, Arabs, Persians, and most Indians are Caucasian, too). Second, the powers-that-be don’t consistently categorize Hispanics as white. For instance, if a Hispanic invents something or registers another triumph, he’s billed as “Hispanic!!!” (with emphasis on the exclamation points). But if he commits a crime?
Then he may be a “white” perp.
The bigger picture is that, increasingly, Americans know they can no longer trust official statistics. As we continue declining morally, we become more like the former Soviet Union, where, we finally realized, stats weren’t just fudged — they were completely fabricated.
